Our civilization is locked in the grip of an ideology - CORPORATISM.
An ideology that denies and undermines the legitimacy of individuals as the citizen in a democracy.
The particular imbalance of this ideology leads to a
worship of self-interest and a denial of the public good.
The practical effects on the individual are passivity and conformism in the areas that matter, and non-conformism in the areas that don't.
John Ralston Saul

13 February, 2010

Al-Jazeera Invades Canada and Threatens America

FREEDOM OF SPEECH, US-american style.

Fact: Almost nobody watches Al-Jazeera in the USA or Canada. There is reported ly 1 (one) cable channel that gives this valuable channel to viewers PART-TIME! Not even BBC Worldservice -- firmly in the service of power and in favour of anglo-american dominance -- is being watched by US-americans!! But AlJazeera is outright censored.

Like in most western anglo-american ruled nations, the corporate neo-fascist "news" channels FOX, CNN, MSNBC are without any competition. Orwell could not have dreamt of a better system. 1984 is here.

One moment! Have you actually watched Al Jazeera? You'd be amazed at the high quality reporting that flies in the face of US-war party patriotist idiot TV

But now, please read the hate-filled anti-free speech rant!! Executive Summary: You -- the viewer -- are to weak to resist the AlJazera propaganda, you need to be "protected". Hahaha.

Al-Jazeera Invades Canada and Threatens America

Written by Cliff Kincaid -- Wednesday, 10 February 2010 18:39

The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) has approved a request "to add Al-Jazeera English (AJE) to the list of television satellite services for distribution in Canada. Supporters of the Arab government-funded propaganda channel hope that acceptance in Canada will lead to more cable and satellite carriers in the U.S. picking up the incendiary network."

A group called "Canadians for Al-Jazeera" organized public pressure on the CRTC to approve the entry of AJE into the Canadian media market. Although the group's leader, Walied Khogali, is described in news reports as a Canadian, he identifies himself on his Facebook page as a fan of Barack and Michelle Obama, Students for Barack Obama and the Democratic Party.

He supports "the Red Movement" that mainly acts to protest Israeli policies and promotes the "I love Allah" T-shirt and the "Bush shoe thrower" from Iraq.

But Philip J. Crowley, Assistant Secretary of State in the Bureau for Public Affairs, criticized Al-Jazeera's coverage of the Haiti relief effort at the State Department press briefing on January 26. "When you're talking about international reporting," he said, "we have had-I've had direct conversations with our friends at Al-Jazeera, for example. And we have spent some time critiquing what we felt was unfair, unbalanced coverage of operations in Haiti." He explained that he had "a conversation" with "officials at [the] Al-Jazeera, English channel" about "inflammatory" coverage suggesting that U.S. relief efforts in Haiti constituted a military plan to take over the country.

More serious and severe criticism has come from Judea Pearl, father of slain Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, who has called Al-Jazeera "today's greatest recruiter for terrorism." His son's murderer, 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who is now in Guantanamo but has been scheduled by the Obama Administration for a civilian trial in the U.S., boasted of his murder, saying that he "decapitated with my blessed right hand the head of the American Jew, Daniel Pearl, in the city of Karachi, Pakistan. For those who would like to confirm, there are pictures of me on the Internet holding his head."

CRTC commissioner Marc Patrone said in the lone dissenting opinion that the decision to permit broadcasting AJE was made without adequately addressing concerns that the channel could engage in spreading "ethnic and religious hatred." He also expressed concern about the foreign ownership of the channel. "In weighing the merits of all foreign services, the regulator should be particularly sensitive to 'state-owned' or 'state-financed' services originating from nations with radically different attitudes towards freedom of speech and democracy in general," he said. See No Evil

A group called Canadian Journalists for Free Expression (CJFE) welcomed the decision to allow AJE into the country but said nothing in its statement about the fact that the channel is funded by the oil-rich Sunni Muslim monarchy in Qatar and that there is no freedom of the press in Qatar itself.

The U.S. State Department says about Qatar: "The constitution provides for freedom of speech and of the press in accordance with the law, but the government limited these rights in practice. Journalists and publishers continued to self-censor due to political and economic pressures when reporting on government policies, material deemed hostile to Islam, the ruling family, and relations with neighboring states. There were reports that security authorities threatened both individuals and organizations against publishing certain articles."

What's more, it goes on, "Citizens lacked the right to change the leadership of their government by direct ballot. There were prolonged detentions in overcrowded and harsh facilities, often ending in deportation. The government placed varying restrictions on civil liberties, including freedoms of speech, press (including the Internet), assembly, association, and religion."

Commissioner Patrone noted that the CRTC had provided a "stark appraisal" of the record of Al-Jazeera Arabic (AJA) in 2004 when approving its license for the Canadian media market only if the content were recorded and monitored by cable and satellite carriers. No distributors picked up the channel because of those restrictions, which have not been applied by the CRTC in the case of AJE. This means the channel may find it easier to get in more media markets.

But Patrone said that because of the treatment of AJA, "one might have expected this most recent application by the same network's English-language service would have been subject to the most rigorous examination possible-one which included a reconsideration of the entire network's journalism policies. Regretfully, this hasn't been the case."

"While some of the interveners argued that the Commission should consider AJA's broadcasting record, my colleagues, consistent with the Commission's usual approach, chose not to do so," Patrone explained. "The consequence of this decision, in my opinion, is that it did not allow for the kind of comprehensive investigation of Al Jazeera's entire record that I believe was warranted."

Patrone added that one of the interveners, a group called Honest Reporting Canada, had submitted documentary evidence to the commission noting that some reporting of AJE, despite its claims to be objective, has been unbalanced, unfair, and inaccurate. It cited specific instances of such reporting.

Honest Reporting Canada said, "We are apprehensive that AJE will be unabashedly anti-Israel, journalistically unfair, inaccurate and unbalanced, and may potentially carry content which exposes Jews to hatred and anti-Semitism. We have relayed our concerns to the CRTC and to the Canadian sponsor of AJE, Ethnic Channels Group Ltd."

Cut From the Same Cloth

Patrone noted that Ethnic Channels Group Ltd (ECGL) claimed that AJE and AJA "were distinct services and submitted that it would be inappropriate to consider AJA's broadcast record in order to assess the request to add AJE to the list, even if they share a common owner." The CRTC seemed to accept this dubious assertion.

In fact, an AIM special report found evidence that key Al-Jazeera English personnel had come from Al-Jazeera Arabic. The emir of Qatar, Hamad bin Khalifa Al-Thani, is chairman of the boards of directors for both channels.

In the U.S., largely because of efforts by Accuracy in Media to expose the channel's links to terrorists and funding by an undemocratic regime, AJE has had limited distribution and acceptance. However, it has spent countless oil dollars of the emir on expensive public relations firms in order to obtain more outlets. AJE is now being carried in the Washington, D.C. area through the MHz Networks.

While not arguing for any federal action to keep the channel out of the United States, AIM has told potential cable and satellite carriers that it offers anti-American programming designed to incite Arabs and Muslims to hate and kill Americans and Jews. AIM produced a documentary, Terror Television: The Rise of Al-Jazeera and the Hate America Media, featuring evidence that Al-Jazeera inspired foreign Muslim fighters to go to places like Iraq and Afghanistan for the specific purpose of killing U.S. service members.

AIM demonstrated, through a videotape captured after the liberation of Iraq by U.S. forces, that Al-Jazeera's first managing director was an agent of the Saddam Hussein regime. In addition, one of Al-Jazeera's Afghanistan reporters, Tayseer Alouni, went to prison in Spain on terrorism charges. Al-Jazeera paid Alouni's salary, legal fees and "related expenses" during his trial and continues to defend him.

American Journalist Bails Out

Our charges of bias were vindicated when the top U.S. journalist at Al-Jazeera English, Dave Marash, left the channel and said that anti-American bias was a factor in his decision to leave. Prior to the channel's launch in 2006, Marash had claimed that Al-Jazeera English would be editorially autonomous and independent from Al-Jazeera Arabic. Marash told the Columbia Journalism Review that Al-Jazeera officials in Doha, Qatar, had wanted to do a series on "Poverty in America" that was "so stereotypical and shallow" that AJE in Washington, D.C. rejected the idea. "And so the planning desk in Doha literally sneaked a production team into the United States without letting anyone in the American news desk know," he said. The result, he said, was just as he predicted-a shallow and stereotypical story.

The CRTC had received a request on February 27, 2009 from Ethnic Channels Group Limited for the addition of AJE to the Canadian distribution list. The ECGL had stated that AJE's Code of Ethics included "journalistic values of honesty, fairness, balance, independence and credibility" and "was taken very seriously by AJE's reporters and management."

This is laughable, of course. As AIM disclosed during the U.S. presidential campaign, Al-Jazeera aired a Moammar Gadhafi speech praising then-candidate Barack Obama and followed with a story depicting supporters of GOP vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin as white racist Christians. The Al-Jazeera "reporter" who did the hit piece on Palin was Casey Kaufmann, who surfaced in Federal Election Commission (FEC) records as a $500 contributor to the Obama-for-president campaign.

In terms of "ethics," Judea Pearl has described how Al-Jazeera not only covered but helped sponsor the August 2008 birthday of Samir Kuntar, a released terrorist who had smashed the head of a four-year-old girl with his rifle butt in 1979 after killing her father before her eyes. Kuntar had been released by Israel in exchange for the bodies of two Israeli soldiers, who were kidnapped by Hezbollah in 2006.

"Al-Jazeera elevated Kuntar to heroic heights with orchestras, fireworks and sword dances, presenting him to 50 million viewers as Arab society's role model," Pearl noted in a Wall Street Journal column. "No mainstream Western media outlet dared to expose Al-Jazeera efforts to warp its young viewers into the likes of Kuntar. Al-Jazeera's management continues to receive royal treatment in all major press clubs."

>From CNN to Al-Jazeera

"I have to explain to people that I'm not the voice of Osama [bin Laden]," AJE correspondent Rizwan "Riz" Khan defensively told a National Press Club International Correspondents Committee event on March 9, 2007. Khan, who worked for the BBC and CNN before going to AJE, also wrote the book, Alwaleed, an official biography about the billionaire Saudi prince who has become a major investor in News Corporation, the parent company of the Fox News Channel.

Bin Laden's continuing use of Al-Jazeera as a mouthpiece for al Qaeda came on January 24, when the channel broadcast the terrorist's latest audio tape. "Ever since the 9/11 attacks in 2001, Al Jazeera has been the network al-Qaeda has often chosen to deliver its messages to. For al-Qaeda, the channel's reach in the Arab and Muslim world, as well as its global audience, is key," acknowledged the report on AJE. It said that Ahmed Al Sheikh, editor-in-chief of Al-Jazeera Arabic, had confirmed the tape was bin Laden's voice.

Bin Laden took responsibility in the tape for the attempted Christmas Day bombing attack on the U.S.

The AJE aired the views of various people who claimed that airing the tape didn't mean that Al-Jazeera was in any way sympathetic to the terrorist group. One talking head even claimed that while airing the tape meant that the channel had exclusive "access" to al Qaeda, this gave Al-Jazeera increased "credibility."

Five days later, on January 29, Al-Jazeera aired another bin Laden tape blasting the U.S. for contributing to climate change.

Bin Laden Quotes Leftist

In the recording, according to Al-Jazeera, bin Laden also stated that "Noam Chomsky was correct when he compared the US policies to those of the Mafia. They are the true terrorists and therefore we should refrain from dealing in the US dollar and should try to get rid of this currency as early as possible." Al-Jazeera identified Chomsky as "the US academic and political commentator" when, in fact, the professor is a member of the board of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism, a Communist Party spin-off group, and well-known for his anti-American and anti-Israel views. On another occasion, Noam Chomsky was identified by Al-Jazeera as "the renowned US academic, author and political activist" and appeared on a show on the channel called "Inside USA." He had previously appeared on Riz Khan's program.

(please note: Noam's statements are based on innuendos and baseless facts as he never sites a source for his information)

Al-Jazeera Arabic on February 7 aired an interview with the U.S.-born Yemen-based "religious scholar" Anwar al-Awlaki, who is actually an al-Qaeda propagandist and recruiter and has been accused of being linked to the murderous attack at Fort Hood and the Christmas Day attempted bombing. "I have said in an earlier interview with Al Jazeera's Yusri Fouda that the United States is a tyrant, and tyrants across history have all had terrible ends," he said. "I believe the West does not want to realize this universal fact. Muslims in Europe and America are watching what is happening to Muslims in Palestine, Iraq and Afghanistan, and they will take revenge for all Muslims across the globe."

Why Not Al-Jazeera?

The U.S. House of Representatives in December passed a resolution (H.R. 2278) by a vote of 395-3 to "direct the President to transmit to Congress a report on anti-American incitement to violence in the Middle East..." It was sent after passage to Senator John Kerry's Senate Foreign Relations Committee for further action.

The resolution declared that "The broadcast of incitement to violence against Americans and the United States on television channels and other media that are accessible in the United States may increase the risk of radicalization and recruitment of Americans into Foreign Terrorist Organizations that seek to carry out acts of violence against American targets and on American soil."

The sponsor, Rep. Gus Bilirakis (R-Fla.), said passage was a blow to "terror TV" and that the report from President Obama "must include a country-by-country list and description of media outlets that engage in anti-American incitement to violence in the Middle East and a list of satellite companies that carry such media."

However, Al-Jazeera was not named in the text of H.R. 2278 while other television networks associated with Hezbollah and Hamas were.

Yet the legislation defines "anti-American incitement to violence" as "the act of persuading, encouraging, instigating, advocating, pressuring, or threatening so as to cause another to commit a violent act against any person, agent, instrumentality, or official of, is affiliated with, or is serving as a representative of the United States."

It will be difficult for officials of the Obama Administration to argue that the definition does not apply to at least some of the programming from its "friends" at Al-Jazeera.

Cliff Kincaid is the Editor of Accuracy in Media, and can be contacted at

=== LEFTY PROFESSORS ARE DANGEROUS!! ===

Send them to the Gulag!!

Liberal tendencies explored

By Timothy Sandoval -- Published: Wednesday, February 10, 2010

A recent study proposed a new theory that may explain why professors tend to be liberal.

Authors of the study, &ldquo;Why are Professors Liberal,&rdquo; theorized that the occupation of professor has become politically typecast. According to the study, liberals are more likely to become professors because the position is perceived as a liberal occupation.

&ldquo;Professors are wrapped up with the identity of liberalism,&rdquo; said Ethan Fosse, a PhD candidate at Harvard and author of the study. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s very difficult to separate being a professor with being liberal.&rdquo;

Typecasting occupations is common in many fields, Fosse said.

Evidence from other studies indicate that occupations such as nurses and elementary school teachers are typecast, but typecast toward gender.

&ldquo;People sort themselves into certain occupations, in part, based on their identity,&rdquo; Fosse said. &ldquo;They think: &lsquo;this is the kind of person I want to be.&rsquo;&rdquo;

The study by Fosse and Neil Gross, associate professor of sociology at the University at British Columbia, is the first of its kind that questions professorial liberalism. Studies in the past have usually been tainted by political bias and the use of anecdotes or hearsay, Fosse said.

The study finds that many factors contribute to professors being more liberal than the rest of the population besides typecasting. Factors such as higher degree attainment; the disparity between their level of income and education; identification as Jewish, non-religious, or non-fundamentalist Protestant; and professors expressing greater tolerance for controversial ideas, all contribute to professors being liberal.

Ernest Cowles, director and professor of sociology at Sacramento State, said he thought the theory was interesting and probably true.

&ldquo;If it happens I don&rsquo;t think it&rsquo;s deliberate or intentional,&rdquo; Cowles said. &ldquo;I think it&rsquo;s based on the characteristics of people and how those are packaged together.&rdquo;

Noam Chomsky, M.I.T. linguistics professor and political activist, said he disagrees with the description of professors as liberal.

&ldquo;True, professors tend to be liberal on social issues and civil rights, rather like CEOs,&rdquo; Chomsky said. &ldquo;But they tend to be strong supporters of state violence and repression, again like CEOs.&rdquo;

Fosse said he disagreed with Chomsky.

&ldquo;Based on our studies and others, compared to the rest of the population, professors are more liberal on just about everything you can imagine,&rdquo; Fosse said.

Lee Doren, a liberty activist for the Competitive Enterprise Institute, said he believed the author&rsquo;s theory, though valid, is incomplete.

Doren, who recently gave a lecture titled &ldquo;Avoiding Liberal Indoctrination in College,&rdquo; said that inherent in intellectualism is the idea that intelligent people should make decisions for non-intellectuals.

The study also shows that there are differences in political ideology among disciplines. According to the study, professors in economics, engineering and business tend to be more conservative than professors in other disciplines.

This happens because conservatives and liberals often have much different motivations. Liberals are often more interested in jobs that are meaningful and serve others, while conservatives are more interested in wages and prestige in their jobs, according to the study.

In his lecture, Doren said all of America&rsquo;s public schools, not just universities, were &ldquo;leftists indoctrination camps.&rdquo;

Cowles said he believes professors probably do carry their political views into their classrooms, but said he believes most professors will make clear their opinion from what is fact.

Here is a neo-fascist reight-wing corporate whore who attempts to smear THE LEFT.

Of course, wholesale ignoring the putrid machinations of the 9/11 inside job and the CIA's + Banker's many crimes against the progressives around our world.

Still, it is worth a read, as some lefties were indeed fascinated with Hitler. But there were jews who collaborated with Hitler, and the fathers of the state of israel have supported Germany's Nazi movement because the English were their enemy...

=== Intellectuals and Society

Posted by Robert Wargas on Feb 12th, 2010

In 1980, during a debate for Milton Friedman's Free to Choose series, Frances Fox Piven, of Cloward-Piven infamy, tried to lecture Thomas Sowell on race and economics. Her contention was that equality of opportunity had failed and what black people needed was a strong dose of socialism. "That's why equality of results became an issue -- for black people in the United States," she said, "and they expressed their concern -- ."

"No, you expressed it, damn it!" Sowell shot back. "It's what you choose to put in the mouths of black people."

The moral of the story is that Thomas Sowell does not put much faith in Ph.D. degrees. Three decades later, at age seventy-nine, he once again pounces on armchair theorists and assorted ivory-tower types in his newest book, Intellectuals and Society. Sowell identifies his targets as "people whose occupations deal primarily with ideas." In other words, ideas are the finished products of their labor. This category could include writers, philosophers, and the literature professor who thinks Hamlet is about a young man struggling with the horrors of capitalist society.

These intellectuals are different from others not only because of their interests, but because of their method of operation and the incentive structure that comes with it. Unlike carpenters, who produce tangible goods, or scientists, who produce theories that must be tested against results, the dealer in pure ideas is cut off from the normal feedback mechanisms that filter faulty notions out of the intellectual landscape. An auto mechanic who can't fix transmissions is bound to go out of business, just as a civil engineer who designs a bridge that collapses is apt to suffer some problems with his career.

Not so with intellectuals. "Not only have intellectuals been insulated from material consequences, they have often enjoyed immunity from even a loss of reputation after having been demonstrably wrong." Their insularity can also lead to dilettantism, as the intellectual is not constrained from wandering into fields completely outside his or her own. The pattern is clear: Chomsky the linguist becomes Chomsky the foreign-policy wonk. Michael Eric Dyson the minister becomes the expert on everything racial. Your anthropology professor becomes an expert on healthcare economics.

Though his main topic is focused, Sowell's context is wide. He discusses economics, war, the law, the media, politics, and race. For decades, these subjects have been the canvases on which intellectuals have painted their grotesque portraits. Sowell documents not only the disastrous ideas themselves -- straight out of the mouths of characters like John Dewey -- but discusses why those ideas have failed so miserably.

Sowell is one of the greatest debunkers of our time, capable of laying waste to vast fields of demagoguery through slash-and-burn logic and empiricism. No one throws the wrench in the leftist chain quite like him. The most devastating chapter of the book is the one entitled "Intellectuals and Economics," in which Sowell obliterates common claims about "income distribution," poverty, and inequality. His bÃªte noire is the person for whom evidence is merely optional filigree. (Who needs evidence when one is flying under the banner of "social justice"?) Bromides about the "widening gap" between rich and poor don't consider that individuals are constantly moving between income brackets, as Sowell illustrates. Looking merely at statistical abstractions creates the illusion that "the rich" and "the poor" are merely static, immutable categories, rather than mere classifications through which many different people are constantly passing.

Intellectuals' perverse desire to see some sort of "plan" imposed on society has made for a decidedly sordid history of their ilk. The Progressives of the early twentieth century, for instance, were bona fide racists, and the academic extension of their ideas was the eugenics movement. It comes as no surprise, then, that the revolutionary creeds of Italian Fascism and German National Socialism were especially intriguing to the intelligentsia, despite their being mislabeled today as "conservative" or "right wing" movements. Sowell reminds us that these ideologies were originally considered left wing by the intellectuals themselves. Lincoln Steffens, who glorified Soviet Communism, also reserved praise for Mussolini. Other radical socialists who shared his sentiments included British novelist H.G. Wells and American historian Charles Beard.

Still more saw the ultimate promise of collectivism in the Nazi movement. During the 1920s, W.E.B. Du Bois, prominent black historical figure and devoted communist, became so fascinated with Nazism that he decorated the magazine he edited with swastikas. This love affair was not a one-night stand, either. As late as 1936, Du Bois remarked that "Germany today is, next to Russia, the greatest exemplar of Marxian socialism in the world."

The ease with which intellectuals migrate from one squalid "ism" to another has necessitated some revisionism on their part. It was only after the West fully realized the horrors of the Italian and German dictatorships that the intellectual Left disowned them in a massive act of historical face-saving. Writes Sowell: "The heterogeneity of those later lumped together as the right has allowed those on the left to dump into that grab-bag category many who espouse some version of the vision of the left, but whose other characteristics make them an embarrassment to be repudiated."

If there's any weakness with the book, it's that Sowell is himself an intellectual, making it easy for left-wing bloggers to dismiss him even if they can't refute the book's arguments. There are differences, however, between this book and the putrid machinations of a Noam Chomsky or a Cornel West: Those intellectuals are so sure of their ideas they have no doubt they'd make the perfect blueprint for society. Sowell, on the contrary, has never advocated anything except leaving people alone. Also, part of intellectuals' decidedly anti-intellectual strategy, as Sowell points out, is their inoculation against empirical evidence. That socialism killed millions in the twentieth century, and that quasi-socialist policies have wiped out inner cities in America, makes no difference to the tenured cultural studies professor.

Sowell, then, while being an intellectual according to his own definition, is in practice far more scientific and accountable. His awareness of human fallibility is straight out of Burke or Hayek. The absence of this quality in radicals is what makes today's intellectual climate so uninviting. Sowell writes: "Because the vision of the anointed is a vision of themselves as well as a vision of the world, when they are defending that vision they are not simply defending a set of hypotheses about external events, they are in a sense defending their very souls -- and the zeal and even ruthlessness with which they defend their vision are not surprising under these circumstances."

Robert Wargas is a writer and graduate student who lives on Long Island, NY.

== comments worth reading ===

Dr. Sowell and Mr. Wargas are masters at babble-speak. Try arguing against any of the multitude of facts contained in several (take your pick) of Prof. Chomsky's books on US foreign policy. No, you better stick to bogus generalizations and lofty ad hominem attacks, and continue to hope your readers are either too busy, uninterested or plain intellectually lazy to figure out the truth.

====

corporatism and outright fascism killed millions in the twentieth century - Fascism 2.0 (Bush, US corporations, US military, banks) continues to kill those who are endangering the mind-cartels of the US media doctrines.

=====

Karim says:

February 12, 2010 at 11:09 pm No, but you dont mind if they steal your tax dollars and give them to banks,waste your childrens future by declaring illegal and destructive wars,shred your constitution,spy on you,legalize torture ecs.But ofcourse you are not ruled.Never.You are Americans.You are free.What a joke.

In today's world, the goals of a committed anarchist should be to defend some state institutions from the attack against them, while trying at the same time to pry them open to more meaningful public participation— and ultimately, to dismantle them in a much more free society, if the appropriate circumstances can be achieved.Noam Chomsky